The Worries of a Syrian Rebel Commander

Late in the afternoon, after I had been at his apartment in the Turkish border town of Reyhanli for almost four hours, Fares Bayoush, a Syrian Army defector and rebel commander, decided that it was time for lunch. It was a quiet Sunday, and a few friends of his had come over—allies from the rebellion, mainly, and buddies from back in Kafr Nabel, Bayoush’s hometown, in the province of Idlib. While the guests anxiously discussed the setback that had just been dealt to their confederates in the Free Syrian Army in Idlib—where, nine days earlier, a brigade of hard-line Islamist fighters had seized warehouses containing weapons and taken over the local headquarters of the F.S.A., the leading Western-backed rebel force—Bayoush quietly excused himself and left the room.

He returned a few minutes later with plates of flatbread and a black plastic tablecloth, which he spread, laboriously, on the floor. At forty-three years old, Bayoush is youthful and fit, with a narrow, flinty face, and a superficial dusting of gray atop his otherwise jet-black head of hair. But three battle wounds in the past two years have taken a toll—the last one, in October, required a transfusion of twenty units of blood—and left him with a pronounced limp on his left side. (He has been in Reyhanli for the past three months while he recovers.) The only time that I saw him use his left hand to do anything other than lift a Gauloise to his lips—he was trying to pass a tray of salad across the room—the arm failed him, and the vegetables tumbled to the floor.

It had snowed the week before, during a winter storm that inflicted further misery upon the millions of Syrians who have been displaced from their homes by the war. The small apartment where Bayoush was staying with his family was cold and drafty, and filled with what looked like cheap, borrowed furniture. Bayoush is a religious man (he prayed twice during the time I was with him), and his wife and daughters sat sequestered in a room to the back, hidden away from unfamiliar male eyes. His son, Maged, who is twenty-one, and frequently accompanies his father to the front lines, sat in the living room with us—alternately soaking up the political arguments and projecting an air of casual indifference. (During periods of the latter, he entertained himself by flipping through photographs he’d taken at recent battles, or playing a soccer video game, on his smart phone.) He did not join his father in prayer.

Lunch was late because Bayoush and his friends had been up much of the night trying to regroup after the warehouse incident, which cost the Free Syrian Army control of much of the non-lethal equipment donated by the United States, and tarnished its reputation at home and abroad. The outside reaction was swift: the U.S. halted all shipments of aid into Syria, Turkey closed the border, and Qatar reportedly made disapproving phone calls to the Islamist factions that had carried out the raids.

After a number of meetings between the various rebel factions in Reyhanli and northern Syria, there were small signs of reconciliation. The Islamists had begun returning some of the vehicles they stole, Bayoush said, and most of the F.S.A. officers who had fled into Turkey were on their way back. He seemed relieved: the F.S.A. can hardly afford to open a second front against the formidable Islamist brigades. “They are the best fighters in Syria,” he said. “At this point, we cannot take them on directly. They are too big.”

Bayoush is neither a major commander nor an insignificant one. By his count, his brigade numbers about fourteen hundred men, though only three hundred of them fight at any given time, owing to a weapons shortage. He commands great respect from the fighters within his territory, yet has little public renown outside Syria. (A Western official told me, without going into details, that Bayoush’s brigade, Forsan al-Haq, is considered “pretty reputable.”) He considers himself part of the Free Syrian Army, but not beholden to its leaders.

His role in the military campaign against Bashar al-Assad captures something of the uprising’s fundamental weakness—its decentralized, inchoate power structure—but it also suggests what could be a hidden resiliency. At a time when some observers are proclaiming the collapse of the Free Syrian Army, the constituent parts of the rebel forces, such as Bayoush’s brigade, remain committed and intact.

The uprising wasn’t always so complicated. When Bayoush first decided to join the rebellion, in the summer of 2011, he quickly made a plan to seize the military air base in Deir ez-Zor, where he served as an aircraft engineer. The plot was sniffed out by his superiors (Bayoush suspects that a traitor tipped them off), and as the ringleader, he was sentenced to eleven months in a military prison. His revolution might have ended there, but Bayoush was unreformed. “I never thought I would see a revolution in Syria,” he told me, as we sat in his living room earlier in the day. “The regime, it scared everyone.” For a military officer, this was especially so—the slightest slip-up in front of anyone who might inform on him, even a close family member, could mean the end of his career, or worse. “I always felt afraid—afraid of everybody, my son, my wife. I couldn’t ever say what I really thought about anything.” When he was released from prison, he fled directly to Idlib, where he started pulling together his militia.

It was a heady time, but the troubles of a long, underfunded campaign—“the problems between ourselves,” as he calls it—were already creeping in. Supplies were scarce, and when they materialized—including at least one major shipment of vehicles and heavy weaponry from Qatar—there was a vigorous struggle among the men for their use. “It’s like this,” Bayoush said, holding up a glass of dark tea. “There is only one glass. So if I give it to Mohammed”—he gestured toward one of his lieutenants, who was sitting on the couch across from him—“then Maged is going to get angry. ‘Why didn’t you give it to me?’” Such petty jealousies, he said, were “the main problem for the whole Syrian rebellion.”

Meanwhile, criminals and other unsavory characters were drawn to the fight, and its promise of redemptive glory (or easy plunder). Bayoush said that he had tried to expel repeat troublemakers, including one mid-level unit leader whose fighters kept finding themselves in possession of cars that belonged to residents. But he wasn’t always successful. “Sometimes, there was nothing I could do,” he said with a shrug. “Maybe he has a lot of supporters with him, or maybe he just doesn’t want to listen to me.” Bayoush insisted that insubordination and graft were even bigger problems for other militias, whose commanders might be construction workers or farmers, rather than experienced military officers.

His account of how the uprising lost its momentum closely mirrors the official narratives put forth by rebel officials in Istanbul, or their Western lobbyists—though Bayoush does not share their insistently sunny outlook. When Western military aid failed to materialize, the seams of the enfeebled Free Syrian Army frayed, while brigades of radicalized fighters, flush with foreign funds and weapons, flourished. Soon, a battle within the opposition was underway over control of the highways and towns of the liberated north. Foreign journalists found themselves subject to a startling risk of kidnapping, and all but stopped travelling to northern Syria. Syrian activists also began to flee the country, fearful of reprisals from the new Islamist factions springing up, especially the Al Qaeda affiliate Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (I.S.I.S.).

The origins and goals of the radical Islamists have remained a mystery, even to Bayoush. “We really don’t know what they want—and I think they don’t know either,” he said. “They are fighting us, and we are fighting Assad.” The Americans also confound him. “When we want America to be powerful, it won’t use its force, and when we don’t want America to involve itself, it does it anyway,” he said. These days, his faith in the Americans is so low that he suspects that the U.S. might even be in league with the Islamists. (U.S. officials vehemently deny this.) He added, “Now, the problem is much bigger than Assad.”

This was the topic that his friends were debating as they settled down for lunch. The weekend’s events remained shrouded in mystery, and no one seemed clear on who had done what, or why. According to Bayoush, the takeover had been a classic Trojan Horse deceit: fighters from the newly formed Islamic Front had come to the Free Syrian Army headquarters to propose that the two groups form an alliance and refocus their efforts against Assad. Once they were inside, however, guns were drawn and the Islamists took control of the facility. (Other versions have it as a full-scale invasion, or a rescue operation by the Islamic Front against unnamed assailants. “Add that to the list of stories,” a State Department official working on Syria said, when I told him Bayoush’s account.)

One of the guests at lunch was Hassan Mirei al-Hamadeh, a Syrian Air Force pilot who became a hero to the revolution, in 2012, when he defected by flying his MiG-21 straight into Jordan. Since then, he hasn’t had much to do. (A rebellion that doesn’t have any planes isn’t much in need of fighter pilots.) He was wearing a navy blue tracksuit and a black peacoat to ward off the cold, and offered a surprisingly upbeat assessment: the attacks were a good thing because they revealed to the world the true nature of the Islamist brigades. They had overplayed their hand, and would be chastened.

Bayoush listened without saying much. He was feeling depressed. Earlier, he had received a call from a contact inside Syria, who told him that the head of the rebel military command for Hama, a major city in the north, had been kidnapped by ISIS. He seemed shellshocked. “The news is very bad,” he said. “They’re compelling us to fight them.”

A few hours earlier, Bayoush had told me, “One year ago, our hope was so big—about building our country, about a civil state. We wanted to make a democracy for our people. We thought we would live in luxury.” Now, he looked around the group of men with him in Turkey, and wondered who was left to fight for Syria. “I think the good men are mostly outside Syria now. Inside, it’s mainly the bad ones. And if it takes longer, it will only get worse.”

He stared ahead silently for a moment, puffing on his cigarette. Then, he added, “We are heading into the unknown.”

Above: A Free Syrian Army fighter in Aleppo, in November. Photograph by Molhem Barakat/Reuters.